Tuesday 7th April 2009

 British oil worker kidnapped in Port Harcourt
 Gunmen blow up houseboat
 Impact on oil output
 Death penalty for kidnap rejected by former Justice
 Gov: No threat of terrorist attacks on Embassies
 Soku Gas Plant shut down days after restart

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British oil worker kidnapped in Port Harcourt

 
Gunmen have kidnapped a British oil worker from a hotel bar in Port Harcourt. One police officer was killed in the attack and another wounded.

 
Assailants kidnapped the Scot, [name withheld] from a location in the East West Road area of the city. He works for Nigerian oil services company Adamac Industries Limited.

 
In London, the Foreign Office told journalists it had received reports of the kidnapping and was “urgently investigating”.

 
Background: The past three years have seen an upsurge in militant activities in the region with frequent attacks on foreign oil companies and a wave of kidnappings of expatriate employees. Most hostages are released unharmed after a few days or weeks, often after a ransom is paid.

 
Comment: This brings the total number of expatriates currently being held to nine. So far in 2009, OOL has a hostage count of 20 foreign nationals being taken in total. This number though does not include the two British men who were kidnapped in September 2008 and who are still being held. Their continued incarceration is being directly tied by the leading militant group in the country, MEND, to the fate of their leader Henry Okah who is in jail facing charges that include treason and gunrunning.

Gunmen blow up houseboat

 
Also on Sunday, armed men hit a houseboat used by an oil firm operating in the region and destroyed it. The Joint Task Force (JTF) yesterday accused “some unrepentant and unpatriotic militants” of carrying out an early morning attack in which a boathouse belonging to DAEWOO Nig Ltd was destroyed in Igbomotoru, Delta State.

 
Daewoo, a multi-national Korean engineering company, was working on a pipeline laying project belonging to Nigerian Agip Oil Company (NOIC), a subsidiary of Italian oil giant, ENI Group, when the militants attacked the houseboat at 01.30hrs. Sources report that the attack caught security personnel off guard. The houseboat is intended to house over 80 personnel – both operational and security. No official numbers have been issued on injuries sustained in the assault but sources say that the JTF did sustain several casualties.

 
Spokesman for the JTF, Colonel Rabe Abubakar, has confirmed the attack which he claimed was carried out by “some miscreants bent on creating unnecessary tension aimed at thwarting government efforts at developing the area.” Abubakar said that “the JTF will pursue and arrest those responsible for this attack on the facilities.” He warned members of other groups to lay down their arms and embrace the peace efforts, for the overall development of the region.

 
He said it will not be business as usual for militants and their criminal collaborators in the region, adding that the security outfit is fully prepared to clear the region of such elements.

Related: Last week, MEND dismissed an amnesty offer from the government as “unrealistic” and charged that the military was being put on a warpath in the oil-rich Niger Delta. MEND said it would only agree to a peace process in which the United Nations and “reputable international mediators” play an active role. The group’s comments came after President Umaru Yar’Adua said his administration was considering granting amnesty to militants who are ready to lay down arms and reintegrate into society. Yar’Adua also said the government will empower its special military force in the volatile Niger Delta to better fight militants in the region. See Chief’s Briefs 03.04.09

 
In a statement to media, MEND spokesman Jomo Gbomo responded saying that a ‘holistic peace process’, which must address core issues such as fiscal federalism, was imperative for the group’s consideration of the government’s amnesty offer. He described President Yar’Adua’s amnesty gesture as “a hoax,” arguing that “you do not grant amnesty to someone who has not been convicted in the first place.”

 
Gbomo accused Yar’Adua of ignoring the Niger Delta technical committee’s recommendations on the crisis, describing it “as a mark of insincerity.” He said: “How does the government expect the followers of a man to drop their weapons for the so-called amnesty when the leader has not been granted one. In the first place, we do not believe we are doing anything illegal to receive an amnesty.” Gbomo said the detained MEND leader was deceived into believing that he was part of a peace process when Vice President Goodluck Jonathan visited him in South Africa prior to Okah’s arrest in Angola and subsequent extradition to Nigeria.

 
MEND said it would not involve itself in any talks with the government because these would fail over time. According to Gbomo, “we will only be involved in talks in which the international community takes part..”

 
Flashback: Gbomo said some militants had been lured by such peace parleys and then arrested or killed, citing some recent incidents in Rivers State. See Chief’s Briefs 29.12.08. & Chief’s Briefs 30.12.08 He alleged that many youths have been executed at police stations and JTF bases as suspected militants.

 
MEND have said the current militarisation of the Niger Delta and the deployment of gunboats to the region might eventually lead to a civil war. It has cautioned that any attack on any of its bases would “lead to the complete halt of Nigerian oil and gas exports and the supply of gas for domestic power consumption.”

Impact on oil output

 
These attacks, including many before last weekend, have cost the nation dearly. A Central Bank of Nigeria report yesterday said that the nation’s oil output had dropped by 300,000 barrels. In the report, the CBN said in January, the country’s daily production of crude oil, including condensates and natural gas liquids, dropped from December’s output of 2.2 million bpd to 1.9 million bpd.

 
It said crude oil exports by Nigeria (which before the Niger Delta crisis, was rated as Africa’s top producer) stood at 1.45 million bpd for the month under review.

 
Although the country is still the world’s eighth-largest oil exporter with a production capacity of 3.2 million bpd, the global meltdown and violence in the Niger Delta have drastically reduced its output to far below its potential. The CBN said due to lower output coupled with the fall in global oil prices, Nigeria’s oil income dropped by 19.2% to $1.85 billion in January from $2.29 billion the preceding month.

 
Comment: Oil accounts for at least 80% of Nigeria’s revenue. The decline in oil earnings led to Nigeria’s external reserves dropping by 6% from the previous level of $53 billion to $50.05 billion in January. Finance Minister Mansur Mukhtar had said two weeks ago that the nation’s oil output had averaged 1.6 million bpd so far this year, while the government’s production benchmark was 2.292 million bpd.

 
Factoid: The government had benchmarked its oil at $45 a barrel for the 2009 budget and the new price of the crude, which fell below $36 per barrel yesterday, is $9 below the budget target.

Death penalty for kidnap rejected by former Justice

 
Former Justice of the Supreme Court, Adolphus Karibi-Whyte, has argued that the capital punishment prescribed by some states would do nothing to stop the menace of kidnapping. He said the measure might even harden kidnappers, leading to more fatal abductions.

 
His words: “When you say a person will be killed if caught for kidnapping, the person will say ‘okay, I better kill since when they catch me I will be killed.’ There is a need for caution. You can arrest somebody in error, try, convict and execute him. When you later discover that he is innocent, you have already killed him and you cannot correct that. That is the snag in capital punishment. You cannot reverse it when you find that you are wrong. That is why most people prefer life imprisonment or 20 years in prison. If the person is innocent and he is still alive you could exonerate him. The better option is not capital punishment. Capital punishment is not a solution for kidnapping.”

 
Comment: While we are also not sure that the death penalty is going to act as a deterrent to potential hostage takers, the former Justice’s argument doesn’t stand up either.

 
Having so little faith in the investigation process operated by the police or the ability of the court system to convict the correct offender is more depressing than the current kidnap figures in our opinion.

Gov: No threat of terrorist attacks on Embassies

 
The Federal Government said yesterday that there was no threat of terrorists attacks of any sort on an embassy or diplomatic mission in the country. Dora Akunyili, minister of information, said the “terror alert” by the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria over the weekend was “uncalled for, there is nothing on the ground to show that any embassy or diplomatic mission in Nigeria was in danger of attack of any sort.”

 
Flashback: The U.S. Embassy, on Sunday, issued a message to U.S. citizens living in Nigeria, saying it had received reports of a possible strike against missions located close to the U.S. Consulate-General in Lagos. See Chief’s Briefs 06.04.09

 
Comment: So no threat of terrorist attacks huh? So what would the Minister call a kidnapping or the destruction of a houseboat on Sunday? What about the car bomb in Delta University that we reported yesterday or the continued captivity of the two British hostages held by MEND? We won’t even start on pipeline attacks, shooting at helicopters and destruction of oil producing facilities or the ever increasing number of piracy attacks offshore. If these aren’t examples of (albeit) domestic terrorism… then we don’t know what is.

 
But maybe we are reading this wrong. Perhaps under the new rebranding of the country being spearheaded by Mrs Akunyili, incidents like these don’t count. If Nigeria really is ‘Good People, Great Nation’ then perhaps calling them criminals, militants and cultists is an easier way for the country to claim that their massively publicised and hugely funded marketing campaign is working.

 
We have no evidence either to suggest that there is any specific attack planned on any diplomatic mission in the area described in the US alert – but saying there is no terrorism in Nigeria is like saying there is no green in grass.

Soku Gas Plant shut down days after restart

 
A major gas and condensate plant operated by the Shell Petroleum Development Company Nigeria has been shut down just eight days after it came online from a four-month shutdown, a Shell spokesman said Monday. The Soku gas plant in southern Rivers State has been shut down again, this time “for operational reasons,” Precious Okolobo said. Okolobo declined to give further details, and said Shell would have the plant online again “as soon as we can.”
Flashback: The plant was restarted March 29, See Chief’s Briefs 01.04.09, after being shut down since November year after attacks by oil thieves caused leakages in the pipeline. See Chief’s Briefs 28.11.08

 
Before the shutdown in November Soku was supplying 1.1 Billion cubic feet of gas a day to the Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas plant – 40% of NLNG’s total gas supply – and 30,000 barrels a day of condensate to an export terminal.

 Nigeria supplies 10% of the world’s liquefied natural gas supply.

 
SPDC and NLNG are joint ventures between the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation and international oil majors Shell, Total and Agip.